Keen On America

Tim O’Reilly won’t get fooled again. Or maybe he will. While he is fearful of the winner-take-all nature of current AI economics, he still has some faith that the system can be reformed. So what’s the alternative to the vicious cycles of Silicon Valley capitalism? How can we change the script so that history won’t repeat itself once again?

This is the first of a two part conversation with Tim. Please let me know if you want the transcript and I’ll try to post. Enjoy!

EPISODE 1910: In the first part of conversation with the noted tech writer and thinker Tim O'Reilly, Tim explains why OpenAI has an Uber problem and how successful tech companies depend on successful ecosystems

Tim O’Reilly is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of O’Reilly Media, the company that has been providing the picks and shovels of learning to the Silicon Valley gold rush for the past thirty-five years. The company delivers online learning, publishes books, and runs conferences about cutting-edge technology, and has a history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. If you’ve heard the term “open source software”, “web 2.0”, “the Maker movement”, “government as a platform”, or “the WTF economy”, he’s had a hand in framing each of those big ideas. Tim is also a partner at early stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), and on the boards of Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox. He is the author of many technical books published by O’Reilly Media, and most recently WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us (Harper Business, 2017).

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

This is a conversation with former mobster now mafia historian Louis Ferrante about his intriguing new book BORGATA: RISE OF EMPIRE. The former “chop shop” small time thug now erudite Ferrante is like a cross between Sonny Corleone & Niall Ferguson. Essential viewing/listening. Transcript below.

AK (00:18): Hello everybody. It is Tuesday, January the second, 2024. We're in a new year, but old themes. Last year we did several shows on the Mafia, one with the historian Paul Moses on the what he calls, at least the true story of the immigrant cops who fought the rise of the Mafiaa. He had a new book out called Appropriately Enough, the Italian Squad, another with an interesting writer, Matt Beck, the Life We Choose about a series of conversations he had with a Mafiaa member called William Big Belly Delia. He talked about not just Donald Trump and Michael Jackson, but also Jimmy Hoffer, and we're going one better in 2024 rather than writing or talking to people who have spoken to people in the Mafiaa. We have a man, Louis Ferrante, who once upon a time was a member of the Mafia. And since become a very successful writer, the author of many books, bestselling books, including particular Mob Rules, what the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman. It was a huge hit. And he has a new book out. It's a history of the Mafia, the Borgata Trilogy, volume one, rise of Empire. It came out in November of last year in the uk, and it's out this week in the US. Louis Ferrante is joining us from his home in Sarasota on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Louis, before we went live, you told me it's very nice in Florida.

Louis Ferrante (02:01): Florida's beautiful, the Sunshine State, a lot of sun. I need sun. I grew up in New York, and the winters are dark and dreary, and London's a beautiful place too. I like the people in London, but once again, the weather's not the best part.

AK (02:17): Dreary. Yeah, I'm talking to actually from California. So Louis, when you fly out and you get on a plane, you happen to sit next to someone and you get into conversation and they ask you what career you have or had, what would you say?

Louis Ferrante (02:31): I'd tell 'em a hijacker if I'm on a plane.

AK (02:36): And what do they do?

Louis Ferrante (02:38): They look for the attendant or they go to the bathroom? No, I mean, I was a truck hijacker, a little different from a plain hijacker, but I tell them I'm a writer and a television host, which is the truth. I'm a bestselling author. My books have been translated into 2020 languages, and I hosted a show for Discovery Channel.

AK (03:04): It's a good trade being a writer. But did you always intend to be one, or how did you go from being, as you say, a truck hijacker, someone who knows the Mafia, the American Mafia to actually writing about it.

Louis Ferrante (03:21): I faced the rest of my life in prison, and I was lucky to get out of it with a 13 year sentence. I was represented at the time by the civil rights attorney, William Kunstler, who was very instrumental in, yeah, he helped Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. He went in to negotiate with the convicts during the Attica riots, and he defended me, and I was able to get a plea of 13 years without cooperating against anyone, and I didn't have to go to trial and possibly get the rest of my life sentenced to rest of my life in prison. And while I was there, I started to think through my life and eventually I picked up my first book, fell in Love with books, became an avid reader, and at some point or another I was reading a book a day, and that's what made my time go. And I started to teach myself how to write by reading all the great authors and taking notes as to how Leo Tolstoy begins and ends a chapter, how Dostoevsky Begins and Ends a plot, how Charlotte Bronte introduces a character, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how I taught myself how to write. And by the time I came home from prison, I was ready to be a writer. And my last book, Mob Rules was an international bestseller in 20 languages. And my current book will hopefully get picked up in a lot of languages as well. And it's a trilogy.

AK (04:42): Yeah, it's already been picked up by the Germans. You imply that in prison, you were a meticulous reader. Is meticulousness something that's prized within the mafia? Was that one of your skills?

Louis Ferrante (05:00): Skills? Yeah, I mean, I was a heist guy. I ran a crew of heist guys, heist and hijackings, and you need to know what you're doing and everything's, you got to cross your T's and dot your i's make sure that everybody knows their role. Make sure that you need a well-oiled machine when you're going to do a heist or a hijack in one mistake. And everybody's lives are at stake, including innocent people. Something I might regret now, but something that was just a fact then. But we wanted to get away with it. We wanted the money. I wasn't thinking about people's lives back then. I was thinking about money and we wanted to get away with it, and you need to know what you're doing and everybody needs to know what they're doing. And I was a big planner. I would make drawings, I would go over everything with everyone. I would do mock runs to the highway to make sure we had an escape route, a backup escape route. I made sure we had backup guys in place. I never just pulled the trigger too fast. At one point, I was picked up by the feds in California where you are. We were in San Francisco and we were looking to hit an armored car, and the feds swooped in on us and grabbed us the day before we were going to hit that armored car. And it was a crucial thing. I was one guy short, and the reason why we waited was I was w...

EPISODE 1909: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Louis Ferrante, author of BORGATA: RISE OF EMPIRE, the meteoric rise of the Cosa Nostra from 1860s Sicily to 1960s America

Louis Ferrante is a former Mafia associate and heist expert who served eight years in prison after refusing to incriminate his fellow Gambino family members. His last book, Mob Rules (HarperCollins), was an international bestseller, and his Discovery Channel Series, Inside the Gangsters Code, earned him a Grierson Award nomination for Presenter of the Year.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1908: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Alix Olson and Alex Zamalin, co-authors of THE ENDS OF RESISTANCE, about radically new and historically trusted strategies for resisting neo-liberalism

Alix Olson is an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Emory University’s Oxford College. Before her academic career, she toured internationally as a spoken word artist. Olson is the editor of Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution (2007) and is a widely published poet.

Alex Zamalin is professor of Africana studies and political science at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He is the author of six books, including Struggle on Their Minds: The Political Thought of African American Resistance (2017) and Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (2019), also with Columbia University Press.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Happy New Year everyone!

Substack are automating the transcripts now of video interviews. It’s free (at the moment), so no apologies if the transcripts are worthless. But more to come on this front in 2024.

I enjoyed listening to Kunzru. Hope you will too.

EPISODE 1907:  In our weekly KEEN ON wrap of tech news with Keith Teare, author of  the THAT WAS THE WEEK newletter,  Keith explains why predicting the future is for fools and looks back at 2023 while refusing to make hard predictions about 2024

Keith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. He was also previously the founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for TechCrunch and since 2011 has invested, accelerated or incubated many Silicon Valley startups including Around (sold to Miro), Millicast (Sold to Dolby), InFarm, Miles, Quixey; M.dot (sold to GoDaddy); chat.center; Loop Surveys; DownTown and Sunshine. Teare has a track record as a serial entrepreneur with big ideas and has achieved significant returns for investors.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1907: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to the novelist and Harper's magazine columnist Hari Kunzru, about our nostalgia for vinyl records and the reappearance of ethnic nationalism in Italy.

HARI KUNZRU is the author of six novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in Brooklyn.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1906: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Noa Yedlin, author of STOCKHOLM: A NOVEL, explains why literary humor isn't a funny thing and imagines the kind of character Netanyahu might be in a novel

Noa Yedlin is an Israeli author, the recipient of the Sapir Prize (the Israeli Man Booker) and the Prime Minister's Literature Award and author of the bestselling House Arrest, Stockholm, People Like Us and The Wrong Book. Yedlin was named by Haaretz Magazine one of "66 Israeli Women You Should Know". Yedlin is also the creator of a two-season TV series based on her bestselling novel Stockholm (the Israeli Best Mini-Series TV Award). A German remake of the series (You Don't Die Among Friends) won Best Scripted Format at 2021 International Format Awards and Best European Series at La Rochelle Festival De La Fiction 2021. The series is now being re-made by SVT Sweden (broadcast: Christmas 2022). Her bestselling novel People Like Us is currently being developed into a series in Israel. A stage adaption of House Arrest is now playing at Beit Lessin Theater in Tel Aviv. Yedlin is considered one of Israel's top writers. Her novels – widely known for their dark and subtle humor - sketch with biting precision the complex relationships both within the family and outside of it, while capturing and deconstructing the spirit of the times. Yedlin deals with global phenomena that infiltrate the personal realm and shape our everyday lives - the rise and fall of social elites, shifts in the balance of power and the never-ending battle between individualism and conformism. Noa Yedlin’s new novel, The Wrong Book, was published in Israel May 2022 by Kinneret Zmora Dvir Publishing House and has been starring at the top of the best-sellers’ list ever since.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1905: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Gerard Epstein, author of BUSTING THE BANKERS' CLUB, about why bankers represents both the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of American capitalism and how to create a more equitable financial system for the rest of us

Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 1981. Epstein has written articles on numerous topics including financial crisis and regulation, alternative approaches to central banking for employment generation and poverty reduction, economists’ ethics and capital account management and capital flows and the political economy of financial markets and institutions. Most recently his research has focused on the impacts of financialization (Gerald Epstein, ed. Financialization and the World Economy, Elgar Press, 2005), alternatives to inflation targeting (Gerald Epstein and Erinc Yeldan, eds. Beyond Inflation Targeting: Assessing the Impacts and Policy Alternatives, Elgar Press, 2009.) and financial reform, and the Great Financial Crisis (Martin Wolfson and Gerald Epstein, eds.) The Handbook of The Political Economy of Financial Crises, Oxford, 2013. He is writing a book in connection with an INET project on the social inefficiency of the current financial system and approaches to financial restructuring. His book, Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us, University of California Press will soon appear.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.